Promise Unrealized

The tragically interrupted rise of Dave MacDonald

Feature Article from Hemmings Muscle Machines

Every era spawns its own prodigies in auto racing; people such as Joey Logano and Jason Line are only recent examples. It's very difficult to make a case that the 1960s, however, were abnormally rich in depth. American motorsports had broken free of its immediate post-war amateurism and now had a whole orbit of industries and media hungering to embrace it, elevate it, expose it to new audiences.

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All this new opportunity yielded incredible talent that encompassed practically every discipline or genre of competition. Drag racing: Nicholson, Prudhomme, Robinson. Stock cars: Petty, Pearson, Lorenzen. Championship cars: Andretti, two Unsers, Jones. Sports cars: Gurney, Hansgen, Donohue. All were, and still are, justly regarded as giants. One more name could have--should have--ended up on that list of greats. Dave MacDonald, lost on the fringes of superstardom in the most horrible manner imaginable, deserves to be remembered as the 50th anniversary of his death approaches.
MacDonald unquestionably had every bit as much driving prowess--as much of the special stuff that makes a great--as everyone listed in the last paragraph. He was a child of California car culture during the magic era, having been born in 1936 in El Monte, just outside Los Angeles. He lived the life. Came up through hot rods and dragsters as a teen, and met his wife at El Monte High School. MacDonald loved the Chevrolet Corvette, which was how he met his future roommate and Shelby American colleague, Dave Friedman, who is determined that his friend will be remembered.
"Dave was three years older than me. I used to go around to the road races and started taking pictures, turned it into a little business, and as a 17-year-old kid, I was making $200 or $300 a weekend selling photos to him and the other guys," Friedman recalled. "He was a mechanic at Don Steves Chevrolet when he became a top Corvette road racer in California, and then, in 1963, came to Shelby American. Before that, however, MacDonald was one of two drivers (the other was Dr. Dick Thompson) that Zora Arkus-Duntov asked to test the Corvette Sting Ray prototype at the General Motors proving grounds."
If you were a tough guy in big-bore California sports cars, you got noticed. According to Friedman, MacDonald spoke realistically of his goal: winning the Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 500 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He actually came fairly close to making it. Had he lived, MacDonald would almost assuredly been part of the all-out Ford assault on Le Mans. He finished 10th in his only Daytona 500 start, in 1964, running a Bill Stroppe-prepared Mercury Marauder against the Hemi blitz led by Richard Petty. Then came the 1964 Indianapolis 500.
MacDonald had caught the notice of Mickey Thompson, another product of California hot rodding, who had latched onto the mid- and rear-engine evolution of the Indy car with some attention-grabbing but uneven-performing race cars, starting with the John Crosthwaite-designed cars of 1962. By 1964, they'd gone through Buick and Chevrolet power, very radical 12-inch wheels, an attempt at full-body streamlining, and a slew of drivers (including MacDonald's California cohort, Billy Krause).
Friedman expresses unapologetic animosity for Thompson over what happened next, undiminished by Thompson's 1988 murder. The 1964 version of the car had a titanium chassis, higher-profile tires and a four-cam Ford V-8 for power. Mac-Donald and another sports-car ace, Masten Gregory, were hired as drivers. Gregory wrecked one car and, despite nearly qualifying it, branded the car as woolly and dangerous. Jim Clark tracked MacDonald into the pits during practice and urged the rookie to follow Gregory off the property. Both Andretti and Graham Hill had rejected rides with Thompson. The car was a virtual tub of racing gasoline, but MacDonald hadn't practiced with a full fuel load.
On race day, MacDonald started 14th. By lap two, he was passing cars, sideways in the corners with a car that he obviously couldn't control. Before completing that lap, MacDonald lost it, slammed into the inside wall, exploded, and rebounded into the path of crowd favorite Eddie Sachs, a two-time 500 polesitter who'd come within a frayed tire of winning in 1961. Sachs, riding in his own octane bath, drilled MacDonald and died instantly in the tremendous fireball. MacDonald lasted no more than another hour. It remains the most ghastly carnage ever to occur in front of a full crowd at the Brickyard. By the next year, gasoline was banned as a race fuel there.
"He should have gone to the top. He deserved to. If he had listened to Shelby, he would have," Friedman recalled. "I remember a conversation we had by the engine dyno with Shelby, Ken Miles and Dave right before he went back to Indianapolis, with him saying he hated the car, it was a piece of [junk], and Shelby said, 'Don't drive it. We'll build you a Lotus-Ford for next year,' 1965, because Shelby had all the connections, but Dave said, 'No, I've got a contract,' and we all know what happened next. That car was dangerous, and had no right to be at the Speedway, but that's another story."

This article originally appeared in the October, 2010 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.